For those of you who have been following the saga of the
Cream Legbar chicks since they first hatched in March, I’m proud to announce that
the cycle of life, egg to chicken to egg, reached a milestone this morning when
I found the first little pullet eggs. I
found not one, but three eggs! The
mystery is, are these eggs from three pullets, or did one pullet start laying
three days ago and I’m just now finding the eggs? Until I find more proof, I’m going to vote
for the latter. I check nest boxes
diligently, several times a day, but the little pullet(s) that laid these eggs
is a novice egg layer and still a little confused as to how it is all supposed
to work. I found all three eggs in the
dust bath! I am hoping that the
responsible party will figure out that dust baths are for bathing and nest
boxes are for eggs, and I’m also hoping that the other Legbar pullets don’t
follow this example.

All along, I’ve been expecting blue eggs from these hens, so
was surprised when the eggs turned out to be sort of aqua—very close to the
color of the eggs I get from my Easter Eggers.
So then I checked the Cream Legbar
Standard of Perfection.
Interestingly, while the very first sentence describes the Cream Legbar
hens as “prolific layers of blue eggs,” further down under “Economic Qualities”,
the egg shell color is described as “blue or green”. And the British
Cream Legbar Standard describes egg colors of blue, green, or olive! So while the first three eggs are not the
blue I expected, they meet the standard and they are, in fact, very pretty.

If you would like to read the story of the babies from the
early days of March when I was picking out a broody hen to be their surrogate
mom up to the present, here’s a linked list of the blogs in chronological order:

Right now I’m
supposed to be sitting on the third deck behind home plate watching the
Minnesota Twins play baseball.Instead,
I’m at home dealing with another coop crisis.Before I explain, I should just say that this no doubt will become a “first
in a series” post since it’s just the beginning of another “ongoing-situation.”And I should also say that if you are eating,
or squeamish, or eating and squeamish, you should probably not read this.

Roxie the Rhode Island Red

This time it’s
Roxie the Rhode Island Red.My poor Reds
have just taken a beating lately!I
noticed a couple of days ago that Roxie had some diarrhea—it’s an easy thing to
notice when a bird’s feathers become soiled with poop.When I notice this on just one hen and it’s a
new thing, I keep a watchful eye, but I certainly don’t panic.Hens get diarrhea—sometimes it’s just due to
the heat or “something they ate” and sometimes it’s due to something more
serious.So I watch and wait.Roxie seemed bright-eyed and active so my
concern for her was mild at most.

This
afternoon as I was cleaning the coop I noticed Roxie make a couple of attempts
to hop the short distance into a nest box and fail at both attempts. This is when my concern went up a few notches
and I picked her up for a quick exam.
Her eyes were bright, her comb was a nice bright red, and neither her
crop nor her abdomen felt puffy or distended.
But there was a lot of poopy feathers on her back side, so I flipped her
over to take a closer look and then audibly gasped. She had become fly-blown. Here’s the part you don’t want to read if you’re
squeamish. Sometimes in the summertime
certain flies find their way to hens who are suffering from diarrhea. Flies, as we all know, love poop. So the female fly deposits her eggs on the
poop-laden feathers. When the maggots
hatch, they immediately burrow into the chicken’s skin and create bloody skin
ulcers that are laden with thousands of maggots. A hen can go from normal to fly-blown in 24
hours, and can go from fly-blown to dead in an equally short period of time. Roxie’s back end was teeming with
maggots. I immediately carried her to
the house, took her to the laundry room, and bathed her several times in dog shampoo
and water, removing all the poop and maggots that I could find. I found several large maggot-eaten ulcers around
her vent. I trimmed the feathers around
all the bad spots and treated them all with Veterycin, an antimicrobial for
animals. Then I installed her in a crate
in the basement, and mixed up some probiotic and electrolyte solution to get
her diarrhea under control. After that I
finished cleaning the coops, and in the process checked all of the chickens to
make sure that nobody else was maggot-infested.
It took the rest of my afternoon & most of my evening. Tomorrow morning I’ll start in again and give
Roxie’s ulcers a good wash with betadine and follow up with more
Veterycin. Roxie will be living in the
basement until she heals. Her diarrhea is
not yet under control, there are no doubt more fly eggs that I missed that will
hatch into maggots, and there is the strong possibility that the ulcerated areas
will become infected. She’ll be getting
lots of baths and TLC. I really hope
that this sweet little bird makes it.

Speaking of sweet, my wife, Kathy, scratched the baseball game off her evening's plans and went out and bought Chinese takeout for both of us. I told her later that one thing I'd accomplished today was to grasp two expressions of love: "Love is being willing to pick maggots and poop off your chicken's butt. And love is when you see your husband storm into the house, wild-eyed, ranting, and with a chicken under his arm, and you just calmly do what you need to do." Kathy rolled her eyes and in an aside to our dog said, "You know, Bailey, it sounds like I love him and he loves his chickens." Well, yeah. I do love my chickens. She hit that nail on the head. But I love her kind of a lot, too.

My Hipster
Hens live the good life. They have plenty of space to move around—each bird has
9-10 square feet of coop space, they can go outside every day as long as the
weather allows it, and “outside” is either the spacious “hen pen” or the half-acre
chicken run. Both the run and the pen
have plenty of dirt for scratching and lots of trees for shade. Both coops have ample roosting space, plenty
of nest boxes and a large container of sand for dust bathing. The birds get free choice commercial chicken
feed, grit, and oyster shell as well as some scratch grain every night as a
treat and all the garden waste and kitchen scraps that I’ve got.

Here we are
in the dog days of summer. Pretty much
everybody thinks of the dog days of the summer as that part of summer where the
weather is so hot and humid that our lethargy reaches its peak and all we want
to do is hang out in a cool and shady spot away from the mosquitoes, like an
old lazy dog. If I were a dog I think I might
be offended by the phrase. In fact “dog
days” original meaning had nothing to do with lazy dogs, and I’m going to share
it with you now so you can tell all your friends and impress them with your
knowledge.

The
constellation Canis major (direct
translation from Latin: “big dog”)
contains the star Sirius, which is often described as being the dog’s
nose. Sirius is also referred to as the Dog
Star and is one of the brightest stars in the sky. During July and the first part of August,
this bright star rises into the sky almost simultaneously with the sun, thus
these days are called “the dog days.” So
now you’re impressed with my
knowledge, right? Well, don’t thank me,
thank Google.

My wife and
I are taking a “dog days” vacation to escape the heat and humidity and will be
camping on the north shore of Lake Superior.
Since Lake Superior is such a huge body of cold water, it creates its
own weather system and one can count on the temperature being at least ten
degrees cooler by the lake, so it will be great. The chickens, sadly, are not coming along and
will have to deal with the heat and humidity in the care of our chicken
sitter. They wouldn’t have much fun
anyway—there’s no place to roost in a tent.

I’ve
prepared this post in advance, and will just need to pull my laptop out of the
car at some roadside coffee shop with wi-fi, click a button, and this post will
magically appear on my blog. Ah, the
joys of modern technology! One can blog
in the wilderness! All one needs is a wilderness
coffee shop with wi-fi! So here’s the
coop news, only a few days out of date:

Speaking of
the weather, Minnesota continues to be hit by summer storms. The latest one took down a small tree and a
few large limbs. Considering that I’ve
got more than a few acres where trees and limbs could fall and not hit anything
it is both ironic and frustrating that they seem to keep falling on
structures. As you can see, this one
landed squarely on my new chicken run tractor gate. I’ve been told that trees falling in the
woods make no sound. When I found this
large limb on my gate, I made several sounds. I got the limb taken care of relatively
quickly, but it was a few days before I could get the gate repaired, so there
was a huge gaping hole for that period of time.
I told the chickens that it was beyond my control and that they were on
their honor not to fly through the hole and escape. Amazingly, that somehow worked. The gate is fixed now and all of the chickens
still live here!

The broody
rehab crate is once again in use. Emily
the Silkie tucked herself away in the depths of a nest box with the idea that
she needed to hatch something. Since no eggs were available, she was actually sitting on a small piece of cast-off cantaloupe rind. It was sort of round and vaguely egg-shaped, but still sort of a pathetic grasping at straws, I felt. So I
put her in jail. She’s recuperating and
hopefully will be back with the other chickens before we leave on vacation.

Sweet Arlene
Barred Rock continues to recover from her molt, lameness, and the battering she
got from some of the other chickens. She’s
living by herself in the open area of the pole barn and whenever I go into the
barn she always runs to greet me. Maybe
she’s just looking for treats, but I like to think that she’s being friendly. Once we’re back from our vacation, I’ll try
reintroducing her to the flock again, hopefully with a better outcome than last
time, so stay tuned for that!

Finally, here
are some new pictures of the Legbar pullets.
They’re starting to look so beautiful and grown-up! They’re finally calming down a little, and
will actually eat out of my hand now. I’m
sure we’re just a few weeks away from those first blue eggs!

In 1904, there was a ten-year-old boy
living in Norway named Thorleif. In
addition to having a really cool name, Thorleif was also a very keen observer
of the things that happened around him.
He was utterly captivated by a flock of chickens that his parents had
given him and spent hours watching them interact. In 1921, Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe used the
observations that he had collected since childhood on the dominance hierarchy
in chickens as the basis for his doctoral dissertation. Since his doctoral paper was published in
German, he used the term “Hackordnung” to describe this chicken behavior.
When his paper was published in English in 1927, this term was translated
as “pecking order.” “Pecking order” has
now seeped into popular usage to the point that it not only describes social
interaction in people, but also an economic theory, a card game,
and a chicken restaurant in
Florida. As a matter of fact the
term has become such a part of the common lexicon that most people have
forgotten, or never knew, that it has anything to do with chickens.

But chickens do peck each other. They have pointed beaks, and their beaks are their main weapon. In the most extreme situation, chickens can peck each other to death. That's unusual, though, and most chickens in most flocks go through the day without major squabbles. That's not to say, though, that chickens are Kumbayah clucking pacifists. There is a social structure and chickens are constantly trying to move up the ladder. The top chickens get their pick of the prime spots on the very top of the roost and get to eat the choicest treats for as long as they like. The bottom chickens find the best spot on the roost they can, and get any leftover treats that the ruling chickens don't want. And while pecking is involved in maintaining the social norm, it doesn't always come to that - usually a dirty look from a more dominant hen is all that's required for the weaker hen to back down.

The flock
of sixteen birds in my big coop actually contains two pecking orders. There are fourteen hens and two roosters in
the flock, and whenever a flock contains more than one rooster, there is a
pecking order for the roosters that is distinct and separate from the hen
pecking order. With only two roosters,
it’s pretty easy to see how things fall out for them. Emile is the top banana. Then, there’s the small auxiliary rooster,
sad little Paul, the frizzled bantam Cochin.
Emile has his way with the ladies whenever and wherever he likes. Paul will occasionally flirt with one of the
hens, and if that hen is not one of Emile’s favorites, or if Emile’s feeling
magnanimous, he’ll ignore the situation.
But if Paul puts a move on Emile’s best girl, or if Emile is in a foul
(ahem…fowl) mood, he’ll chase Paul around the coop until Paul finds a good
place to hide or Emile decides he’s tired.
This goes on every day and will not stop as long as both roosters are
healthy and occupying the same flock at the same time.

The dynamic
of the fourteen hens is a little more complicated. I could tell you in general who the top hens
and bottom hens are, but to actually make a list of the hens from top to bottom
would be very difficult because there is constant shuffling going on. A hen will move up or down a position due to
some subtle interaction that either I don’t witness or I see but don't realize the implications. In general, I’m positive
that Arlene, Barbara, Charlie, and Darcy—the four Barred Rocks—make up the
ruling elite. In general, Barred Rock
hens are intelligent, curious, and adventurous, and are most often the alpha
hens in any flock.

Roosting
time is the best time to watch flock dynamics.
Emile goes to bed early on the top rung and one by one the hens jump
onto the roost to join him. Paul knows
that Emile is loath to get up once he’s settled in for the night, so he knows
this is his big chance to troll the coop for acquiescent hens. Each hen, meanwhile, works her way up the
roost to the top rung and carefully examines the hens already sitting there to
see if there is a hen near her status that she can roost by. If the top rung is already full, she looks
for a hen she can force to move down. If
a hen is not happy with who she winds up roosting by, she’ll not so subtly shove
her body against her roost neighbor and try to force her to move. If that strategy doesn’t work, she’ll casually
start pecking the other hen’s toes. The
pecking escalates to the body, the neck, the head, and finally the comb. Combs are sensitive, vulnerable, and bleed
easily, so the conflict usually ends before it reaches that point when the weaker
hen reluctantly moves to a lower rung. Occasionally,
if the lower hen feels she can take on the hen challenging her and move up a
peg on the pecking order, a full-scale hen fight can ensue, which often ends
with Emile’s intervention.

While all
this shuffling and sorting out is taking place, the Barred Rocks are still
lazily scratching through the coop bedding, or pecking feed. They know that when they decide to go to bed,
they’ll pick any spot on the roost that they damn well please.

And this is the law of the coop. It may offend your sense of fairness and
democracy, but it’s a system that works, and without a system there would be
constant bloody conflict. There are
several situations that cause the system to break down. One is when I introduce a new hen to the
flock. That hen has to fight for a
position in the pecking order, or be mercilessly bullied by all of the other
hens all of the time. Putting a couple
of new hens into the mix always causes a kerfuffle that lasts for several days,
and when the dust and feathers finally settle, the new pecking order can look
very different from the old one. A
second situation is when a hen dies. The
sudden death of Rhoda the Rhode Island Red last week opened up a position
in the hierarchy and there was conflict.
Some hens moved up, and interestingly, some hens moved down. A third situation is when a hen is
injured. Hens that rank below her
immediately press their advantage. Recall
last week’s post about Arlene and Rhoda.
Both hens, when they were ill, felt safer on the ground, outdoors, with
evening approaching, than in the coop with other hens that would probably pick
a fight. A fourth situation is when a
hen is temporarily removed from the flock.
When she goes back, she has to regain her position in the scheme of things. And that brings us to Arlene.

You’ll recall from last week’s post
that Arlene has been under the weather with a lame right leg compounded by a
hard molt. She’s been gradually
recuperating and on Thursday night at roosting time, I decided it was time to
move Arlene back to the coop with the other hens. I swung open the door separating her corner
pen from the rest of the coop and Arlene sauntered out. Most of the hens didn’t react at all to
Arlene’s reappearance among them, but there were a few that did, and it was
interesting to see who they were. First,
Paul the pipsqueak rooster scurried up, bubbling with amorous excitement. I interpreted his ardent clucking to mean,
“Arlene! You’ve been away! I suspect that the decline in your fortunes
means that Emile no longer finds you attractive. But suddenly I find you
so…..approachable!” Right behind Paul
were Arlene’s “friends”, Barbara and Charlie Barred Rock. They seemed to be saying, “Hey, sister, looks
like you’ve got a little limp going on. That
is sooo not cool! While you were away we
saved your spot. NOT! There’s no way we ever want to hang out with
you again, so take a hike now, or
you’ll be sorry!” Of course chickens
don’t really talk. What they were
actually doing was aggressively pecking Arlene.
While I realized that it was important for Arlene to get through the
hazing and reintegrate into the flock, I also didn’t want the situation to get
out of hand, so I waited it out in the coop as the chickens, one by one, found
a place on the roost for the night.
Arlene eventually limped back into her old corner pen and roosted by
herself.

I got up early Friday morning, but
not early enough to be up with the chickens.
By the time I got to the coop the nasty behavior was once again in full
swing—Paul was doing his Lothario routine and the mean girls were
bullying. Arlene was constantly on the
move to avoid their attention and her limp was becoming more pronounced. Also, her comb was bleeding in several places
from hard pecks. I said a few words
under my breath, snatched up Arlene, put her back in the corner pen and shut
the door.

Arlene--with comb scabs after a "conversation" with the mean girls

And that’s where she is today. While Arlene actually seems perfectly happy to be living by herself in the corner pen and with free run of the tractor alley, it isn't a good or permanent solution. She needs to eventually reintegrate with the flock. I'm going to give her some time for her leg to regain some strength and for her comb to heal and then I'll give my next plan a shot: I'll put Arlene back into the coop and do a little social engineering to help her fit in. I have a plan! Will my plan work? Who knows - but it's worth a try. Life in the coop never gets boring!

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Whew! I think that pretty much covers it!

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Mission Statement

Hi! I’m Randy and this is my chicken blog. I write it, edit it, take the pictures, feed the chickens, hug the chickens, etc. I blog because a few years ago, I got these chickens…I had no idea when I got my first chickens that I would get attached to them and become this sentimental, crazy old chicken guy. I had no idea that each chicken would have its own personality, that chickens had such a huge range of vocalizations that they literally “talk” to each other, that they have this amazing, intricate social structure, or that there would be so much drama in the coop—love, conflict, friendship, sex, motherhood, anxiety—a virtual soap opera playing out before my eyes every day.

So I write these little vignettes about my birds that are mostly whimsical but also mostly true. In the process of telling my stories I also pass along a variety of views and opinions which are completely my own. Please also bear in mind that the information I share regarding my care of my chickens has come from my experience caring for my flock. I’m not a veterinarian and I have had no formal education in any kind of chickenology.

There are a few facts that I hope to get across to anybody who regularly reads my blog:

1.My chickens are really cool.

2.All chickens are really cool.

3.The majority of chickens being raised for meat or egg production, in spite of their inherent coolness, are treated cruelly. You can help make changes by your purchasing habits. Educate yourself! Read labels! Check company websites!